Summary

Using a political event coding system, this data collection
describes 8,768 events and press items sampled from 42,000 entries in
THE NEW YORK TIMES between 1968 and 1972. These data were generated in
order to apply events data to the study of the emergence and
processing of political issues in the United States and to test a
number of hypotheses regarding the types of events associated with
various political issues. Approximately 4,600 cases are events in
which an actor attempts to influence a target. The remaining cases are
reports of press items such as editorials and columns. The data
include: (1) whether it was a political event (i.e., one in which an
actor directs some action toward a target in a political system in
order to influence the behavior of the target) or a press item (i.e.,
information about the domestic issue from either a newspaper column or
a newspaper editorial), (2) the domestic issue (one of 40 possible
categories), (3) the domestic subissue, (4) the date and the page of
the newspaper in which the article describing the event was found, (5)
the press treatment or coverage of the event, (6) the actor initiating
the event (coded in one of 100 categories including both governmental
and nongovernmental actors), (7) the federal role favored by the actor
regarding the issue, (8) whether the actor specialized in dealing with
the issue, (9) type of action initiated by the actor, (10) the mode of
action, (11) the target of the event, and (12) the weight of the event
or press item.

Citation

Wynn, Mark. American Political Event Data, 1968-1972. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1992-02-16. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07576.v1

Geographic Coverage

Time Period(s)

1968 -- 1972

Data Collection Notes

The codebook is provided by ICPSR as a Portable
Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe
Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software,
such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy
of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.

Sample

Both random and systematic probability sampling was
used. The events sampled concerned 40 domestic United States political
issues. Twenty of those 40 were designated as major political issues
and 20 were deemed minor political issues. To choose major political
issues, the investigator examined the responses to a question in the
November 1970 Harris Poll, which asked, "What are the top two or three
problems facing people such as yourself you would like to see the new
Congress do something about?" The 20 issues that elicited the most
responses were regarded as the major domestic political issues. THE
NEW YORK TIMES was the basic source for the major political issues due
to its reputation for accuracy and its function as an information
source to elites. Using the NEW YORK TIMES INDEX, approximately 50
entries for each issue area were coded per year. To simplify the
sampling process, systematic rather than random sampling was used. In
order to find a sample of minor issues, the "Table of Contents" of the
1970 CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY ALMANAC, which was a relatively complete
list of the issues considered in the political system that year, was
used. A random sample of domestic issues was chosen from that
list. Those which duplicated the major issues were deleted. The
resulting data were weighted to approximate the total number of events
pertaining to that issue in the INDEX. The weights (N18) equalize the
data, making estimation of the characteristics of the whole population
of reported events and press items possible.